lodges, and both grass for the horses and game for the men had been
fired off the face of the earth by those active foemen before the
drenching wintry rain set in and chilled to the marrow the shelterless
forms of starving trooper and staggering steed.

"Live on the country, indeed! Two antelope and ten prairie dogs was the
sum total of the game secured by the hunters in three days' pursuit. And
what are they," said Captain Truman, "among so many? Barley loaves and
Galilee perch might be made to go round in a bigger crowd in the days of
miracles, but this isn't Jordan's strand," he added, as he glanced
around at the dripping, desolate slopes, and then, fortified in his
opinion by the gloomy survey, concluded, with cavalry elegance, "not by
a damn sight."

"What's the matter ahead, anyhow?" hailed a brother captain, up to his
shins in sticky mud, who had been making mental calculation as to how
many more hours of such wearing work and wretched weather it would take
to unhorse his entire company.

"Don't know," was the short answer. Men fight, but they seldom talk on
empty stomachs.

"Why, I thought I saw you talking with Hastings when he rode back."
Hastings being the battalion adjutant. "Didn't he say what they were
pow-wowing about?"

"No, and I didn't ask. There was nothing to eat in sight, and that's the
only matter that interests my people just now. Just look at those poor
brutes!" And Truman heaved a sigh as he gazed about among his gaunt,
dejected horses, many of them so weak as barely to be able to stand.

"My men are as bad off as the horses, pretty near," said Captain Devers,
the other. "There isn't one of them that hasn't turned his saddle-bags
inside out to-day for the last crumb of hard-tack. They're worn to skin
and bone. Three of them broke down entirely back there at the creek
crossing, and if there weren't Indians all round us, nothing would have
fetched them along. There goes Davies, coddling 'em again, damn it! That
man would spoil any troop----Mr. _Davies!_" he called, and a gaunt, wiry
fellow, with a stiff beard sprouting on his thin, haggard face, turned
away from a bedraggled trooper who had thrown himself in utter
abandonment among the dripping sage brush at the side of the trail, and
came to his troop commander.

"I wish you wouldn't make such a fuss over those men," said Devers,
petulantly. "Just leave 'em alone. They'll come out all right. This
coddling and petting isn't going to do any